Difference between revisions of "PULSAR: Lost Colony"

Latest revision as of 00:57, 26 March 2021

PULSAR: Lost Colony is a science fiction space exploration video game being developed by independent developers Leafy Games, LLC. The video game appeared on Steam October 3, 2013, and was later funded successfully on Kickstarter on October 31, 2013. The game was released in an Alpha state on February 25, 2014.

PULSAR: Lost Colony is a game about space exploration, in which a galaxy is created with a ship of the player's choice. They may warp to several systems and upgrade/repair their ship when encountering a system with a trading post. Combat is also in this game, as the player can attack and board enemy ships. There are several classes to choose from in this game such as: Captain, Pilot, Engineer, Scientist, and Weapons Officer. The game has a single-player and multiplayer available, both modes are exactly the same as it is now. Multiplayer is mainly co-op as you can play with your friends and cooperatively destroy enemy ships,[8][9] beam down to planets, and board enemy ships.

This game includes four playable factions: The Colonial Union, W.D. Corporation, The Alliance of Gentlemen, and The Fluffy Biscuit Company. In the future, other factions will be added, including a "secret faction" known as the Polytechnic Federation. The developers plan to tie in the factions with the story.

The game also currently includes three playable races The Humans, The Sylvassi, and The Robots. Unlike The Sylvassi, and The Robots, The Humans require oxygen, and they have a special ability allowing them to be revived once per jump. The Sylvassi are immune to extreme cold and have a special ability to be able to go invisible for a short time, however they have a lower base health than The Humans and are extremely weak to high temperatures. The Robots have a still lower base health than The Sylvassi however they are immune to all hazardous environments except radioactive, and they can be repaired with a repair gun.

On July 2012, Leafy Games, LLC was created. Shortly after the founding of the indie studio they started their first project, PULSAR: Lost Colony, after several attempts at prototypes for a new game. They released their first development log or "devlog" on their Official YouTube Channel on August 2, 2013 titled "PULSAR: Lost Colony - Video Devlog #0" which marked their first public showcase of the game. Since then they have updated the game several times with new features. They have added features for each station for the roles of Captain, Engineer, Scientist, and Weapons Officer such as: commands delivered by the Captain to the players/bots, ship cores which must be monitored at all times by the Engineer, and viruses/scans delivered by the scientist, and new weapons/turrets have been added to ships. The developers have also added new ships to the game, and planets. The developers post a developer log on their channel, and only recently started scheduling them to every one to two weeks.

Game Play

Classes: Captain

Classes: Pilot

Classes: Weapons

Classes: Engineer

Classes: Science

Scroll way down, spend 1 point on Scanner Mode Research Materials. Spend all your remaining points on Frequency Amplification. Immediately look to the upper right corner of your screen. The first ship listed is your ship.

Monitor Shield Strength: In upper right corner the narrow bar on top is shield strength. If it’s below 30%, go immediately to your Science Station and to the computer window. Under programs you need to activate the program called "Emergency Shield Boosting". If it indicates it is not ready, ask the ship engineer for fuel. Keeping the shield active and correctly configured is your most important role during combat. Modulated shields resist beams. Static shields resist bullets, explosions, and collisions. You should have shields on Modulate unless your pilot or captain specifically requests static because you will typically be under a beam attack.

Sensors help you find things like an enemy ship hiding in a nebula. If your EM Strength is below ten, ask your Engineer if Science is damaged or currently has its power cut. If your ship is persistently unable to find things, ask the captain to upgrade the EM Sensor using scrap. Sensors help you find things like a nearby cloaked ship, a wreck, etc...

The Sensor Dish station is where you fire probes. Left click will fire probes, which extend the range of detection. Holding Right click Sensor Locks a target, making it harder for them to hide from you. You can fire probes forever, however, just like firing a turret gun it will decloak you if you are in a ship with cloaking capability. Use the probes on things you encounter such as space mushrooms, crystals, blue looking light sources, or anything out of the ordinary and the probes will assist you in finding research items, the science you need to collect. You can also use the sensor dish to pick up scrap which is out of range from the ship proximity scrap collection function. Aim your sensor dish at the scrap which appears as blue glowing chunks of debris and Hold Right Click.

Sensor lock and sensor focus: Sensor lock strength indicator is critical as a strong sensor lock give you extra options. The extra options are icons that allow you to click on one of the sensor focus objectives. With a strong sensor lock you can choose to focus the sensor on the enemy ship engineering section as an example. You can have all of your ships weapons focus on what you choose. You could choose to focus on their weapons systems so they lose the ability to attack you.

Collecting Science: You collect research materials from planets and places which you will have in your inventory until you either place them into the ship atomizer or use them for a mission. Research you collect goes into the ship atomizer. Once you atomize the research you receive spendable Research Credit.

Off ship activity: The scientist needs to constantly provide health to injured players in a landing party and use the hand scanner/sensor to find research material, mission objectives, and enemies ahead. When healing crewmates, aim at their head. The healing weapon gets a boost if you aim at the players head. The medic gun shoots through walls, and can damage enemies although at a somewhat slow rate. When using the hand scanner know that red dots are enemies, light blue dots are science/research you need to collect, and green dots are ... Your hand scanner is also useful for detecting enemies that have boarded your ship when you are still onboard.

Tips and Tricks

Launching Pulsar Lost Colony without Loading Steam

You can launch the game outside of SteamOS directly. Make sure you are in the working directory of the game or your settings will not be available.

First, change to the working directory of the game (if you want your game settings and preferences to load properly) and then launch the binary

cd ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony
./PULSAR_LostColony.x86_64

If you do this, you will not be able to join games that require steam verification. However, it might be useful for diagnosis of issues such as sound problems common with Pulsar player voice chat. Here is an example that launches Pulsar with PulseAudio suspended.

pasuspender ./PULSAR_LostColony.x86_64

If you do this do not be surprised if you have no sound unless you made special configuration arrangements with alsa

Configuration

Plugins

Do this I guess...

mono ~/games/PulsarMod/PulsarPluginBootstrapper.exe ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/PULSAR_LostColony_Data/Managed/Assembly-CSharp.dll

Put plugins in this path:

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/PULSAR_LostColony_Data/Managed/Plugins

Save Game Files

When you manually save the game the file will end with the extension .plsave and is located at the path"

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/Saves

The game generates auto-save files in which the game will automatically save the game at regular configured intervals. The path is

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/Saves/Autosaves

Location of user defined keyboard configuration files: (*.bindings)

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony

Location of save game files (*.plsave)

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/Saves

Troubleshooting

Official Game Support

It is recommended to try the game forums at

• http://forums.pulsarthegame.com/

The developers of the game to monitor this forum.

The development team has an email team (at) leafygames.com

log file locations in general

Location 1: Player log showing errors and game crash log location

~/.config/unity3d/Leafy Games, LLC/PULSAR_LostColony/

Files appear as Player.log and Player-crash.log or similar

Location 2: Unity analytics

~/.config/unity3d/Leafy Games, LLC/PULSAR_LostColony/Unity/ xxxxx

Location 3: player voice communication / Team Speak

~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/logs/

VOX Audio Player Communication Failure

You have game sounds such as the environment, ship, gun fire, etc however you can not hear the other players when they speak.

The game uses a built in Teamspeak (ts3).

Sound device attachments:

lsof | grep snd

for Pulsar

lsof | grep PULSAR

Location of ts3 Team Speak log

ls ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/logs/

These logs are separate from the game binary log files and only relate to the voice communication component of the game. They are generated by the Team Speak engine. They are very useful in troubleshooting.

If you see audio devices appear as red in the game audio settings try testing from console

aplay -Dtee:\'plughw:0,0\',/tmp/alsatee.out,raw /usr/share/sounds/alsa/Front_Center.wav

See: Disable PulseAudio + Steam Proton Compatibility Mode Workaround

ts3 snd_pcm_open: Device or resource busy

Specifically, if you are able to hear in game sounds however are not able to hear other player voice communication and you note that the ts3 log reports "Device or resource busy" on a linux system using ALSA + Pulseaudio then this is an exploration of the problem.

The Team Speak log in the game directory reports

2021-03-21 04:27:25.584138|ERROR   |ALSA          |   |snd_pcm_open: Device or resource busy - 
2021-03-21 04:27:25.584403|ERROR   |SoundBckndIntf|   |/home/nicolep/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/PULSARLostColony/PULSAR_LostColony_Data/soundbackends/libalsa_linux_amd64.so error: ALSA

Use the lsof command to see what is using the sound device

lsof /dev/snd/pcm*
COMMAND    PID  USER     FD   TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
pulseaudi 3553 nicolep   mem   CHR  116,9            631 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
pulseaudi 3553 nicolep   52u   CHR  116,9       0t0  631 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p
PULSAR_Lo 4854 nicolep   mem   CHR  116,10           632 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c
PULSAR_Lo 4854 nicolep   68u   CHR  116,10      0t0  632 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c

The hypothesis is that pulseaudio is locking Pulsar, the game, out of the audio device as the game is trying to access directly through ALSA and not use Pulse Audio.

The test is to stop the Pulse Audio service while the game is running, and patiently wait to see if the audio device for the voice communication becomes available (is not highlighted in red within the game settings).

systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service

The result is that the voice communication ALSA device does go from red to black in the game settings, but not immediately (be patient) and player voice communication is restored. However, in-game sounds now fail. In other words, you can no longer hear your weapon fire, the ship engine sounds, or any other in-game sounds.

COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME
PULSAR_Lo 4514 nicolep mem CHR 116,10     618 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c
PULSAR_Lo 4514 nicolep mem CHR 116,11     619 /dev/snd/pcmC0D1p
PULSAR_Lo 4514 nicolep 77u CHR 116,11 0t0 619 /dev/snd/pcmC0D1p
PULSAR_Lo 4514 nicolep 80u CHR 116,10 0t0 618 /dev/snd/pcmC0D0c

Looking at this lsof output you would think both the game sounds and the player voice communication would be active, as they both appear to have a process using the available 2 sound devices. However, sharing is not working. Even though it appears that the device is assigned to a process it is not working, and appearing unavailable to the game.

Should not dmux manage to allow both ambient game sounds and player voice communication to use the ALSA device at the same time?

Current work-around only allows for one or the other, game sounds or player vox. Better resolution being sought...

Update: New workaround seems to address sound and ts3

See: Disable PulseAudio + Steam Proton Compatibility Mode Workaround

Disable PulseAudio + Steam Proton Compatibility Mode Workaround

This seems to allow for audio to work in the game, ship and environment sounds, as well as ts3 player voice communication.

Step 1: Before launching Steam, disable Pulseaudio

systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.socket
systemctl --user stop pulseaudio.service

Step 2: Open Steam, then goto the game properties for Pulsar, the Lost Colony and select "Compatibility" then check the box for "Force the use of a specific Steam Play compatibility tool"

Step 3: Wait patiently as Steam downloads and updates a bunch of stuff. Once that completes attempt to launch the game.

Step 4: Now wait again as Steam downloads a heap more stuff for the game labeled as updates (even though you thought you had an up-to-date game).

Once the game finally launches it will not have sound during the Intro cut-scene, but once in a game you will hear all of the ship and environment sounds, and your ts3 player voice communication should function.

SteamOS Pulsar looking for libsndfile.so.1.0.28 under newroot

You have enabled "compatibility mode" for Pulsar Lost Colony in the Steam Launcher, and, there are no real compatibility options available for your configuration. Right click on the launcher and uncheck "compatibility mode".

SteamOS uses switch_root in compatibility mode, which is useful if you manually wish to configure paths to devices or drivers.

Also, for certain games or system configurations there are other compatibility modes available provided by the game developer or Steam. If you do not see additional compatibility modes available then it will probably not serve you well to enable Steam compatibility mode for this game.

Pulsar, the Lost Colony does offer some compatibility mode options for certain system configurations dependent on your system hardware. You may or may not be able to access and select one of these options.